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Remembering 9/11 With Bach and Brahms

Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan will host concerts commemorating 9/11.Credit
Joshua Bright for The New York Times

IN the topography of 9/11 memory Trinity Church stands mighty.

Its nearby chapel, St. Paul’s, served as a refuge for rescue and recovery workers after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. The chapel’s space filled with cards, banners, artifacts and mementos of an anguished time. Now more than 1.5 million people a year make a pilgrim’s visit, or at least a tourist stop, there.

The rawness of the disaster across the street from the chapel created inevitable sensitivities. Trinity officials were criticized for trying to close the relief effort too early, for later removing the scuffed and gouged pews that welcomed the workers to St. Paul’s, for replacing Trinity’s ruined organ with a digital model.

But there is no arguing with Bach.

Trinity, which also has a powerful and longstanding tradition as a provider of music in New York, is commemorating the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks with a week of free choral concerts, many containing the music of Bach, the great comforter. They will feature the Trinity Choir, one of the best choruses in the city, and other choirs: the New York City Master Chorale; the Young People’s Chorus of New York City; the Washington Chorus; the Bach Choir of Bethlehem, Pa.; and the Copley Singers of Boston.

Groups were chosen from cities or states that were directly affected by the attacks, said Julian Wachner, a composer, conductor and Trinity’s music director. “Everybody has checked their ego at the door,” he said.

After performing at eucharistic services on Sunday, the Trinity Choir, conducted by Mr. Wachner, will sing two alternating programs of Bach cantatas (BWV 131 and 106) and motets at 1 p.m. Monday through Thursday at St. Paul’s Chapel. Trinity is also releasing a recording of the complete motets.

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St. Paul's Chapel in Lower Manhattan, which will host 9/11 memorial concerts along with Trinity Church.Credit
Joshua Bright for The New York Times

On Wednesday at 6 p.m. at Trinity Church the Episcopal parish’s youth chorus will give the first performance of “Trinity Requiem” by Robert Moran. On Thursday at 8 the Chiara String Quartet plays Richard Danielpour’s Quartet No. 6 (“Addio)” and Robert Sirota’s “Triptych.”

Those concerts lead up to a marathon on Friday: 10 concerts at Trinity and St. Paul’s, culminating in an evening performance of combined forces titled “Remember to Love” at Trinity that will include the last three movements of Brahms’s “German Requiem,” Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms,” the “Dona Nobis Pacem” movement from Bach’s Mass in B minor, the Fauré Requiem and pieces by Duruflé, Randall Thompson, Marjorie Merryman, Lukas Foss and Anthony Furnivall. The violinist Gil Shaham will lend star power, along with the singers Anthony Roth Costanzo, Angela Meade, Jolle Greenleaf, Luca Pisaroni and Dashon Burton.

The Trinity Choir offers more Bach cantatas on Sept. 10 and 12 and performs at religious services on Sept. 11.

The emphasis on works by Duruflé, Fauré and Brahms and other gentle, soul-soothing music is no accident. The original idea, to perform Britten’s imposing “War Requiem,” was considered too expensive but also too burdened with an unfortunate title, despite its pacifist nature.

“The message of the piece is exactly the kind of message we want, but in this era of one-second clips, just the word ‘war’ in the title was problematic,” Mr. Wachner said. “The title would have needed education to get to the second line. It’s just too tender a situation down there.”

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Julian Wachner, music director of Trinity Church, left, which will hold 9/11 commemorative concerts.Credit
Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

The organizers also rejected Ralph Vaughan Williams’s “Dona Nobis Pacem,” a cantata that includes vaguely militaristic elements, like language from the Walt Whitman poem “Beat! Beat! Drums!” “We were really being quite diligent in avoiding any possibility of misinterpretation,” Mr. Wachner said.

At the same time the church wanted to transmit a message of reconciliation, Mr. Wachner said. So he included a short work by Martin Amlin called “Time’s Caravan,” which use verses from the “Rubaiyat” of Omar Khayyam and a piece of his own incorporating the same source, “Scenes From the Rubaiyat.”

“We’re looking at universality and reconciliation and peace and the idea of humankind as one big family,” Mr. Wachner said. To avoid making reference to the world of Islam, he said, “I just think would be irresponsible.”

“We do not want to send a message that we are at war with Islam,” he added, “because we do not believe that.”

The 10th anniversary commemorations are but one more chapter in Trinity’s venerable history in New York. The parish was founded in 1697; the present church dates to 1846. St. Paul’s Chapel, six blocks north, was built in 1766 and remains the oldest continuously used public building in the city, the place where George Washington worshiped after his inauguration. As the towers collapsed in the nightmare of destruction on Sept. 11, both churches stood firm, barely touched although covered in grime.

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Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan will host concerts commemorating 9/11.Credit
Joshua Bright for The New York Times

Four days later St. Paul’s opened to police officers, firefighters and construction workers as a place to sleep, have their feet massaged and souls salved, eat at the barbecue outside or just find a bit of rest. Volunteers poured in. The fence outside became encrusted with hats, pictures, ribbons and other items. The walls inside were pasted over with cards and banners. After eight months and a cleaning the church resumed a more usual function, although it did not shy away from its 9/11 legacy, mounting exhibits inside that took on a permanent feel.

“Trinity stepped up,” said Lee Ielpi, a former New York City firefighter whose firefighter son died at the towers and who is president of the board of the September 11th Families Association. “They knew they had a special mission there.”

St. Paul’s is firmly on the tour-bus route now. Plaques were put up outside detailing the 9/11 history. A bronze sculpture representing a sycamore tree that had stood in St. Paul’s churchyard and was damaged in the attacks is implanted outside Trinity. St. Paul’s bookshop sells volumes about 9/11. The pews were removed from St. Paul’s in 2007 to create a more flexible space and to allow the new regular sea of tourists to flow more easily, troubling many who considered them sacred because of their use by the recovery workers.

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The memorial landscape is evolving. The Tribute WTC Visitor Center, developed by the September 11th Families’ Association, opened on Liberty Street in 2006, around the corner from a bronze firefighters’ memorial, and has five galleries. The official ground zero memorial, with its tower footprint pools and bronze list of victims’ names, opens on Sept. 12, with the associated museum scheduled to open a year from then.

The Rev. James Herbert Cooper, Trinity’s rector, said he expected that the new memorial would only increase crowds at St. Paul’s. What effect it will have on the chapel’s exhibits, he said, is still unclear, but some changes are likely. “As long as there’s a St. Paul’s Chapel,” he added, “it’ll be a place that has a 9/11 story to be told.”

Part of that story involves an inevitable reflection on mortality. “Death intrudes on our lives,” Mr. Cooper said, “and this is a place that’s willing to acknowledge that death is a reality and to find the courage to be, in the face of it.”

Mr. Ielpi, the former firefighter, said that St. Paul’s would continue to play a major role in 9/11 memory. “It reflects well on what society, humanity did immediately after 9/ 11,” he said. “We came together as a beautiful, peaceful country. It was a special place because of the heart and soul that went in there.”

Correction: September 5, 2011

An article on Friday about concerts at Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks omitted part of the name of a group that will perform. It is the New York City Master Chorale, not the New York Master Chorale.

An earlier version of this article omitted part of the name of the New York City Master Chorale.

A version of this article appears in print on September 2, 2011, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Remembering 9/11 With Bach and Brahms. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe